Posted
by
timothyon Thursday July 28, 2011 @05:32PM
from the hey-who-can-blame-'em? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A group of Senators are meeting in secret today, while most people are focused on the 'debt ceiling' issue, in order to try to rush through a renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, which expressly allowed warrantless wiretapping in the U.S. The law isn't set to expire until next year, but some feel that the debt ceiling crisis is a good distraction to pass the extension without having to debate the issue in public. The meeting is being held in secret, but it's not classified, so people can demand to know how their Senator voted."

They asked whether [metafilter.com] anyone has written a Javascript library that encodes AJAX requests as extremely suspicious looking emails, meaning every person visiting the site using it would show up as sending emails talking about drugs, islam, etc.

Don't worry, the shit will hit the fan soon and all of this will be irrelevant. There will be wire-taps a plenty in the new republic, but the power and wealth will have been redistributed to someone else.

It's a shame how one state can house both Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. Hopefully the old turtle will be out of office next election. There aren't many who attempt to expand the powers of the executive branch on the level of Mitch, and we'll be better off without him.

I'm just glad my grandfather who fought against this kind of shit in WWII isn't around to witness this shit. WTH has happened to this country? When you have BOTH parties voting AGAINST the people while at the same time practically tripping over themselves to give away the future of this country to special interests for literally pennies on the dollar?

This is why I'm making a call out to every one here at/. since WE are the geeks, the smart ones, the ones our friends and relatives and coworkers listen to I urge EVERY SINGLE ONE HERE to not only vote Green and New Whig straight down the ticket but do everything in your power to get everyone you possibly can to do so as well.

A true multi party system is the only chance this country has short of our own Arab Spring and it is clear that BOTH the Ds and the Rs are not gonna listen to the will of the people. The New Whig Party is made of Iraq vets thinking we should get our boys home and the Greens believe in a true safety net for the poor [greenparty.org] along with affordable housing and health care, things I bet many here would support.

So let us change the system, so that horseshit like this won't be the status quo. I'll even give out a slogan for free "A vote for a Democrat or Republican is a wasted vote" because that is EXACTLY what it is, as they no longer listen to the will of the people. So vote Whig and Green, and push everyone in your sphere of influence to do so as well. Let 2012 be a REAL case of "Hope & Change" and not just more empty slogans!

No Libertarian?
Regardless, we will never have more than a two-party system until we change the election system. A pure first-past-the-post system will only support 2 parties. If you want more parties you need to eliminate primaries and move to a two-tier run off election system. All candidates are thrown in the ring for the first election, and unless one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two candidates return for a second election. This election system takes emphasis off of parties and more on the individuals running. Granted, it's not a perfect system, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we've got or a proportional representation system. If you want to see this change happen, it needs to move from the ground up, starting with city elections and moving to statewide. You must first cripple the beast before you attack it.

No, this is the "American Freedom" that went away after the government realized that the public's fear of terrorism was an excellent pretext for a power grab. We (in America) used to be a lot more free than we are now. It's very sad.

Starting in the 80's American freedoms and liberties started taking a backseat to corporate profits.

Don't forget the War on Drugs and the expansion of the ATF. Waco and Ruby Ridge weren't about corporate profits.

From 80-00 It was a slow decline but from 00-08 it was pretty much a raging plummet

I notice how carefully you selected your beginning and supposed end dates for the plummet. It's still plummeting under Obama. He doesn't get a pass. If you believed his "hope and change" rhetoric during the campaign,

If we don't collapse economically thanks to the US senate, there is some small hope that justice and liberty can be restored in time. America needs a valid liberal progressive party instead of the conservative democrats and regressive republicans.

Hell, I think we would be much better off if we were forced to default. What most call collapse would economically force us to pull our military c**k out of the worlds ass and take care of issues at home. I cheer the coming default, which will happen no matter what Washington does, and I hope those D.C. bastards burn for it.

Default is not inevitable, we can balance the budget, but if we only do a short term debt limit increase the US AAA rating will drop and cost the US another 100 billion a year in interest, making it that much harder to balance the budget in the future. That is what Obama is trying to do. The republicans in the senate are holding our govornment hostage and their only offer is an extra trillion dollars in debt over the next 10 years.

If you believe Obama is actually trying to balance the budget, then all you need to do is look at what his plan actually entails to think otherwise. The same goes for Boener's plan. Both add over $7 Trillion in new debt over the next 10 years and spending levels continue to rise. If they were actually interested in balancing the budget, the would put us on a path to reduce spending and actually balance the budget, but all this is is a bunch of smoke and mirrors to make us think they're doing the right thing. In reality, all they're doing is continuing to expand the power of the federal government, the executive branch in particular. We need to return to Clinton administration levels of spending, adjusted for inflation of course. We can't keep the Obushma empire going.

We need to return to Clinton administration levels of spending, adjusted for inflation of course. We can't keep the Obushma empire going.

With you 100%, but it should be noted we're not that far off from Clinton levels of spending and will more or less reach it once we wind down our two land wars in Asia. We've cratered revenues, however. If we returned taxes to Clinton levels, we would have a small enough deficit that Republicans would be back to calling for tax cuts to prevent a surplus, instead of tax cut

The US really needs to stop thinking that it has to be the worlds police force and pull its troops out of places that it doesn't really need them. Iraq for one (let the new democratically elected government of Iraq decide what sort of military Iraq needs to defend itself).Get out of Europe altogether (the cold war is over and the threat of the Russians are going to send fleets of tanks west is long gone and that's assuming they actually have any armies left after the collapse of their military)Pull all the

I live in Wisconsin, too. The state government here already has pretty much fucked everyone, just like the feds. Do you seriously think a default will cause societal collapse? Not hardly. It will simply force the Government to live within its means. Or do you think that we cannot exist without a bloated fed, state, and local government? Wisconsin is again a great example of this. We are in the top 10 highest taxed states in the nation, yet everything but possibly the university system is a mess, and e

I've been listening to more and more old style folk music (pete seeger, woody guthrie, that era of true progressive lefties) and if you hear the 'fight' in their words and songs and compare to what the right calls 'liberal', you'd see that there are no liberals left in politics or in any kind of power.

if you mention 'unionize' to most people, they look at you like you've said a naughty word. yet, many decades ago (but less than a century) we *needed* the union movement to balance the power that the corporations had. it worked and we got 5 day work weeks.

now, likely, you and I are in software or technology and we say "WHAT 5 day work week?".

exactly.

which is why we need unions for software and technology-based workers; and all businesses where the overly-powerful corporations get to dictate, essentually unquestioned, what we do, how we get paid and even IF we get fulltime benefits (healthcare, etc).

if we had a progressive party or even members of left in the government, we'd see more balance. we might see worker rights increase instead of steadily decrease.

if you have not heard those old folk and freedom songs, give them a listen. look into almanac singers, the weavers, pete seeger, joan baez. they all had a deep feeling for our country and were real patriots. they'd all be extremely ashamed (those that are still living, I'm sure they are ashamed) of what the US has become. we made so much progress in the 60's, only to reverse and actually lose ground in this decade.

we need more rebellion and more public show of dissatisfaction with our so-called leaders.

listen to some of those old songs and put them into today's context and you'll see that we're going thru the same kinds of repression again and again. we have to fight it, again and again, too, it seems.

Clearly you've never lived in SF or you'd know that Liberal Progressives are the flip side of the coin to Neo-Conservative nutbaggers.

Thanks to Liberal Progressives, SF is knee deep in it's own piss and shit while it's political environment while always to the left has become an absolute farce and quite frankly an international joke thanks to these clueless assholes blocking gentrification and non-affordable housing development which has driven out the middl

If we don't collapse economically thanks to the US senate, there is some small hope that justice and liberty can be restored in time. America needs a valid liberal progressive party instead of the conservative democrats and regressive republicans.

If you think the Democrats are conservative, the United States needs "a valid liberal progressive party" like it needs forced labor camps. You are far too ready to take The Road to Serfdom [amazon.com].

I'm reposting a "5 Insightful" on the members of the committee just to illustrate that your precious liberal progressive party is also very in on this fraud. The ones in bold are from the liberal progressive party. For God's sake, look who the f'ing chairperson is?!!?!?! We already have a progressive liberal party running the show and has been since 2008; are you not aware of who has been president for the last few years?!?!? So, no America does NOT need a liberal progressive party, we need a party who

I guess they learned this from somewhere or where just doomed to repeat history.

âoeNaturally the common people donâ(TM)t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and itâ(TM)s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.â --- Hermann Goering, Hitlerâ(TM)s Reich Marshall, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.

Suddenly, it makes sense why all the senators and representatives are making so much noise about the debt ceiling instead of just voting to fix what should have been a relatively minor and uncontentious issue. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the purpose of government is not to wield power, but to distract attention away from it.

I need some input from the Lawn Crowd, did it feel like this in the Watergate days? I'm getting the horrible feeling that after a nice quiet 90's with nothing but a fun little sex scandal we're seeing a whole different class of nastiness today.

It was much worse in the Wategate days. You could tell Nixon was a meglomaniac who might start a nuclear war or conduct a coup d'etat to stay in power.

Congress pretty much rallied together to rid the country of this madman.

The current budget stuff is pretty sickening, but really is a throwback to earlier times in the republic when politics was pretty disgusting as a normal way of life. It isn't the same level of insanity as having a completely deranged President.

the wholesale cut-out of personal freedoms - WORLD WIDE (yes, the US controls the intertubes. this is news to you? all core routers go thru US owned datacomm centers, dummy; and every one of them that is on the backbone has taps for (cough) calea use. and other things.

watergate only fucked over the US and not really citizens, but it was mostly politicians doing the hurting to each other.

this stuff we have now is them doing it to US.

far, far worse for us all. its the sell-out of privacy, in official terms!

and yes, I was around in the nixon days; as a child but still was very aware of the tv coverage and even what we were discussing in school. it was still ok to discuss current events in school, back then.

Nixon was doing the same kind of corruption of personal freedoms that is happening right now - except all on his own and clandestinely without the knowledge or consent of Congress, for his own personal power. Enemies lists and using the IRS to harass political opponents. Massive use of the FBI and CIA to track US citizens including war protesters and other dissidents. It was and still is illegal for the CIA to track US citizens.

And all of this was for one purpose - to preserve and extend his personal power.

but I still see that as limited damage compared to world-wide surveillance that now passes as 'ok'.

not only is there more spying, but it feels a lot less 'free', now, than it did back then. just in general. we always talked about 'the russians' and how they were a 'papers please' kind of society and government. but today, them is us! the things we held up as differentiating are no longer. I see that much, much worse.

I need some input from the Lawn Crowd, did it feel like this in the Watergate days? I'm getting the horrible feeling that after a nice quiet 90's with nothing but a fun little sex scandal we're seeing a whole different class of nastiness today.

No, it wasn't like this.

Watergate was a relatively singular event, which elicited widescale public outrage. You couldn't go anywhere without it being a topic of convesation and dispute.

This is one of ten-thousand such outrages, perpetrated over the past decade. Like most of them, people don't know of it happening, or why it might even be wrong.

It is far, far worse today. The Watergate scandal was clearly limited to the executive branch of government and to a handful of men in the President's innermost circle. The danger to our democracy was clearly limited. There was no danger of a war.

Today we have tens of thousands of employees with secret and top secret security clearances (and I doubt the validity of their background checks also) who are monitoring, following, performing "sneak and peek" operations on U.S. citizens not in the pursuit of ter

Suddenly, it makes sense why all the senators and representatives are making so much noise about the debt ceiling

No, not really. Despite what many on slashdot think, warrantless wire-tapping isn't terribly controversial with the most of the US. Remember, the only time we hear about public discontent with the TSA is when they grope a baby or a grandmother - the bullshit constitutional smokescreen of "administrative searches" isn't even mentioned, much less questioned. No one is getting groped over the phone, so most people don't give a damn.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that this meeting had been scheduled months in advance. But even if it wasn't, it's just opportunism to schedule it now, not the cause of the debt ceiling fiasco, just a side-effect.

You mean most Americans are too stupid to realize they're getting groped over the internet.

And yet apparently most people on Slashdot are too ignorant to know that they may have passed through someone's crosshairs despite the fact that the arrests and convictions keep coming week, after week, after week. Bomb plots, shooting plots, poison plots. Well, it didn't stop Duke Nukem from shipping, so it must not be important. Besides, everyone watches the Daily Show, right? What more would you need to form opinions about important questions?

So in how many of these cases was the investigator unable to get a warrant for a wire tap, a search, or anything else they might want or need? My understanding is that the FISA court basically hands them out like candy and can even hand them out after surveillance has begun.

Well, the first 2 are the chair and vice-chair. I am guessing after that it has something to do with the way the parties assign members to the committees, which is probably alternating parties, by seniority.

At least one "For the People" caucus asspile (Feinstein) is for it... because she's the chair. She also hates the 2nd Amendment... Freedom of Speech (If someone wants to call a gay person a fanny bandit, goddamnit, he should have the right to do so...):)

But then again, she's a Senator... that means she's more out of touch than Helen Keller on acid.

At least one "For the People" caucus asspile (Feinstein) is for it... because she's the chair.

I keep hoping California will get just a couple of competent Republicans running for major offices so we can get rid of Boxer and Feinstein, but instead, the Republicans keep giving us people like Meg Whitman (who ran one of the most evil companies of the Internet age) and Carly Fiorina (who nearly bankrupted two major technology companies in a row before trying her hand at politics...).

A special federal appeals court yesterday released a rare declassified opinion that backed the government's authority to intercept international phone conversations and e-mails from U.S. soil without a judicial warrant, even those involving Americans, if a significant purpose is to collect

You have no right to private communications with foreign powers or organizations aimed at attacking or overthrowing the government of the United States, particularly if they have declared war on the US.

yeah, the government assigns itself a lot of self-importance and overrides the rights and will of the people.

The will of the American people is to not be blown up at Christmas tree lightings [oregonlive.com] and other public functions by terrorists. They are OK with spying on terrorists communicating with Al Qaeda. The Constitution is OK with that. I'm not sure you're "hip" to any of th

The "Christmas tree bomber [oregonlive.com]" incident in Oregon is a really piss poor example to use since it was the suspects own father who turned the suspect over to the FBI who decided that they would use him as a patsy and provide him with the support and materials needed. Now granted they provided defective materials and incompentent support but they just kept stringing the suspect along instead of stopping it there. They then arrested the suspect with his defective bomb, provided by the US government, and wow now we

in order to try to rush through a renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, which unconstitutionally allowed warrantless wiretapping in the U.S.

Don't worry, with the Roberts court, if you sacrifice yourself and push the issue, the Supremes are sure to have a nice 5-4 split vote that will, indeed, prove it's constitutional. It happened with Citizens United, it will happen here.

The court via Clarence Thomas is up for sale [huffingtonpost.com], what less would his sponsors expect?

Bad news. Things are only unconstitutional if SCOTUS agrees that they are. And given authoritarians like Scalia and Clarence "Strip-search-teenage-girls" Thomas, I doubt warantless wiretapping will become unconstitutional any time soon.

Nonsense. The Supreme Court is composed of fallible (and corruptible) human beings. If you believe in the rule of law, and not men, they cannot simply change the constitution by disregarding what the constitution actually says. When the Supreme Court fails in their obligation to uphold the constitution, it doesn't make unconstitutional acts constitutional, it makes the US government illegitimate.

Unfortunately there are certain key words that make people push their own anger aside. These set of words usually includes:
Terrorist
Terrorism
Pedophile
Children
Drugs
War
If you suggested that government was going to search everyone (using the airport scanners) leaving a store to ensure that they didn't steal anything there would be blood in the street.

Civil disobedience is not ignoring the law. Civil disobedience is flagrantly and publicly violating the law with the full knowledge of and the willingness to accept the consequences of doing so. This is why demonstrations are most often done en masse--one guy publicly violating the law is a nutjob or a nuisance; several hundred create a spectacle that is much harder to ignore, strengthening the demonstrators' chances to land in the spotlight and hopefully find widespread support for their cause.

This is why demonstrations are most often done en masse--one guy publicly violating the law is a nutjob or a nuisance; several hundred create a spectacle that is much harder to ignore

Also: it is harder to catch every one of the demonstrators, so there is some sense of "safety in numbers."

For the same reason, fish school. I really like that one, actually: the fish is not getting up close to his neighbor because he's being friendly; he's doing it so that when the predator comes, there's a greater chance of his neighbor gets eaten first.

We can learn a lot from nature.:)

(Similarly, the joke whose punchline is "I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.")

Civil disobedience is a great way to effect change, it's true, but it really can't be applied to warrantless wiretapping. Hell, for us to "ignore" their laws about wiretaps is exactly what they want.

If you want to change this, you need to vote for the most liberal candidate in every election. For the purposes of this post, I'm talking about liberal in terms of civil liberties. Don't worry about their views on economics or foreign policy or whatever, if your main concern is civil rights. Usually, there a

Seriously? You think sitting on your ass in the safety of your mom's basement and using some sort of torrent software is "civil disobedience"?

Civil disobedience is a targeted act intended to draw attention to injustice. Not just being too lazy and too cheap to go buy something instead of pirating it. (Not that I'm in favor of current copyright laws, but the vast majority of file sharers are not violating copyright for political reasons -- they're doing it simply out of convenience.)

He practically founded the movement during the last election, and his son is its current ringleader. The guy doesn't care about personal rights. Not one bit. Look at his stances on abortion and gay rights if you really want to know. He has a lot of rhetoric about leaving things to the states, but ultimately that means repealing the few protections that the federal government gives citizens, and letting states like Arizona implement whatever unconstitutional laws they like. Balkanization of the US, which has

Having an opinion on gay rights or abortion doesn't mean you will stomp over everyone else's rights or right to choose. Im not going to force people to say nice things to gay people just because I think gay people should have all the rights of straight people. That is against a person's right to free speech. Assuming he gets the presidency, he can't even make laws anyway since that is under the purview of Congress. Sure, he can veto the hell out of bills, but Congress can still over-ride. If you believe he

We do still vote them in. If a large enough percentage of their constituency says, "vote this way and I will vote you out," they will very likely change their tune. It works very well in the House and less so in the senate, though it is still effective. Public pressure is the best tool that the public possesses.

That doesn't sound too out of the norm. Typically people dislike congress in general but like their own congress critters. It is similar to schools, public schools suck except for the one their children go to.

Unfortunately as long as they have the R or D behind their name and are in the correctly colored district they more than likely won't be voted out. Granted you can see big swings like the 2010 elections, but those tend to be more a throw the bums out and it doesn't matter who the bums are or what bums replace them. Most people don't follow politics and aren't active. When they do follow them it is in the weeks leading up to the election and there you find out that candidate A like to kick puppies and is a p

The difference is that Phone Hacking scandal may have been done against them where as they are doing this to us. World of difference, you just don't get that this is to stop pedophiles, terrorists, Mexican Drug cartels, and gun runners, just think of the children./sarcasm

Seriously, I'm actually reading 1984 again, and the parallels are scary to what has been going on in the US post-9/11. And to imagine that Orwell came up with this in the late 40's and it's mirrored in today's USA, is literally unbelievable.

Because it wouldn't do any good - at worst they would be martyrs, and at best they would be replaced by someone else just like them. Violence is rarely the best solution, and they were elected after all, so if you want to make a change then campaign for someone else. If you can't find someone better then run for office yourself.

Unfortunately I can't mod in this discussion so could someone mode the parent down, the "President Chocolate Jesus" is really uncalled for and is just trolling. I don't like President Obama, and agree that the up roar during President Bush's administration over these issues by Democrats is strangely missing (hey at least the Republicans are consistent).